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By Root 1630 0

of each spray that burgeoned from the exalted stem, I could see it flower in some face of a wise king or illustrious princess, like the sire of Henri IV or the Duchesse de Longueville. But as these faces, different in this respect from those of the party around me, were not overlaid for me by any residue of physical experience or social mediocrity, they remained, in their handsome outlines and rainbow iridescence, homogeneous with those names which at regular intervals, each of a different hue, detached themselves from the genealogical tree of Guermantes, and disturbed with no foreign or opaque matter the translucent, alternating, multicoloured buds which like the ancestors of Jesus in the old Jesse windows, blossomed on either side of the tree of glass.

Already I had made several attempts to slip away, on account, more than for any other reason, of the insignificance which my presence in it imparted to the gathering, although it was one of those which I had long imagined as being so beautiful—as it would doubtless have been had there been no inconvenient witness present. At least my departure would allow the guests, once the interloper had gone, to form themselves into a closed group. They would be free to celebrate the mysteries for which they had assembled there, since it could obviously not have been to talk of Franz Hals or of avarice, and to talk of them in the same way as people talk in bourgeois society. They spoke nothing but trivialities, doubtless because I was in the room, and I felt with some compunction, on seeing all these pretty women kept apart, that I was preventing them by my presence from carrying on, in the most precious of its drawing-rooms, the mysterious life of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. But M. and Mme de Guermantes carried the spirit of self-sacrifice so far as to keep postponing, by detaining me, this departure which I was constantly trying to effect. A more curious thing still, several of the ladies who had come hurrying, ecstatic, decked out in their finery, bespangled with jewels, only to attend a party which, through my fault, differed in essence from those that are given elsewhere than in the Faubourg Saint-Germain no more than one feels oneself at Balbec to be in a town that differs from what one’s eyes are accustomed to see—several of these ladies left, not at all disappointed, as they had every reason to be, but thanking Mme de Guermantes most effusively for the delightful evening which they had spent, as though on other days, those on which I was not present, nothing more occurred.

Was it really for the sake of dinners such as this that all these people dressed themselves up and refused to allow middle-class women to penetrate into their so exclusive drawing-rooms—for dinners such as this, identical, had I been absent? The suspicion flashed across my mind for a moment, but it was too absurd. Plain commonsense enabled me to brush it aside. And then, if I had adopted it, what would have been left of the name Guermantes, already so debased since Combray?

It struck me that these flower-maidens were, to a strange extent, easily pleased with another person, or anxious to please that person, for more than one of them, to whom I had not uttered during the whole course of the evening more than two or three casual remarks the stupidity of which had left me blushing, made a point, before leaving the drawing-room, of coming to tell me, fastening on me her fine caressing eyes, straightening as she spoke the garland of orchids that followed the curve of her bosom, what an intense pleasure it had been to her to make my acquaintance, and to speak to me—a veiled allusion to an invitation to dinner—of her desire to “arrange something” after she had “fixed a day” with Mme de Guermantes.

None of these flower ladies left the room before the Princesse de Parme. The presence of the latter—one must never depart before royalty—was one of the two reasons, neither of which I had guessed, for which the Duchess had insisted so strongly on my remaining. As soon as Mme de Parme had risen, it was like a deliverance.